Monday, September 2, 2013

About a year ago I wrote on how I believed Dave Ramsey was a genius, but I wanted my own plan, the Automatic Plan. I’m happy to report I’m following my own steps pretty well. I know where my money is going, I have everything set up to savings (I manually pay extra on debt with this amount, not as automatic, but it feels great), and investments. Credit cards are gone, I make payments to my student loans (which I detest), and in a combo deal we are also working towards paying off our home early from rental income. So as of right now I am on step 4 and I am charging ahead. What I mentioned in the notes was “My 7 year Plan” but I never really talked about it.

I always thought I wanted to be a millionaire, own yachts, the Milwaukee Bucks, and own houses all over the world. I soon came to realize this takes a lot of hard work throughout your life, plenty of time, and some luck. Do I always want to be grinding it out looking for that next deal; do I want to be 60 or 70 and just now ready to enjoy my retirement? That just doesn't sound that great to me. I love to travel, enjoy a morning coffee or evening beer in different places, I love Chicago March-November, but winter gets old pretty quick. So I decided that the best way to truly have the option to do what I want at an early age is to be debt free and have passive income.

So being on our automatic plan and having 2 houses that provide rental income, we have a plan to complete our 7 year plan and well RETIRE!!! So I have student loan debt, which I am working on. We have 2 houses, one which we live in, both receive rental income. I am tackling the student loan debt, while we take the extra rental income and pay off each house as quickly as possible. I ran some rough numbers a few months ago and figured out if we took what we made and the rental income we could pay off both of our houses in 7 years! I got pretty excited, because then we would have $0 debt, 7 years worth of investments in stocks(401K, Roth IRA, Individual Brokerage Acct), and passive income from 2 houses. So based on everything we would have $0 debt and 2 passive incomes coming from rental income.

We could retire/semi-retire/do something we really like to do whether it’s volunteering or making 100K, so I would be 38 and living on a small income with my wife, available to travel freely which we really love to do, Miami could be our base home(happy wife, happy life), I could visit friends and family for weeks at a time(your couch will be my couch, your guest bedroom, my bedroom). I could travel to Nicaragua(shown on the right) and hang with the wife’s family, maybe see if I can be a beach bum for a week, go to every single college basketball game in a 50 mile radius for a month, play golf with my Dad every day for a month, I don’t know but that sounds EXCITING to me!!!! My goal is to make it work, little step by little step, sprint by sprint, paycheck by paycheck, I hope you will join me on the ride, because in many ways you already have by reading a blog or two and of course this one.